Victim 1
Masih Alinejad currently lives in New York City. She has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, met leaders of the Western world, given lectures at US universities, spoken on global platforms, and amassed 10 million followers on social media. Not many people know, however, that even in the USA there have been three attempts on her life.
Her name is not mentioned in the indictment against four Iranian nationals that was filed with the US Department of Justice last year. For security reasons, this publicly available document refers to Masih as “Victim 1”.
The four accused were allegedly planning to kidnap her and bring her to Iran. Her movements were being tracked not by the Iranian intelligence agents themselves, but by American private investigators who were told that Masih had got into debt in Dubai and subsequently fled to the US.
Masih recalls that before this attempt, Iranian agents had tried to lure her into a third country (this trick, unfortunately, worked with Iranian journalist Ruhollah Zam, who had been living in France but was lured into Iraq under the pretence of providing exclusive information, from where he was taken by force to Iran and executed). On 31 July of last year, Azerbaijani-born Khalid Mekhdiyev was arrested next to Masih’s home carrying an AK-47 rifle.
Now, Masih has bodyguards. Nobody notices them — they’re professionals from the FBI. I would not have noticed them either if she had not pointed them out to me herself: a man and a woman, not standing out from the crowd, not cutting through it with confident moves, but noticing everything and always ready to come to her defence.
“The word ‘safe’ is too [much of a] luxury for those who dare to speak against Islamic ideology,” says Masih. “Salman Rushdie was going to give a talk at an event [where he was attacked] where the title of his talk was ‘America is a heaven’. I believe [that], and I’m really thankful to the FBI, to the law enforcement in America that they protect me,” the woman says.